Thursday, January 03, 2013

The Persistence Of Rocks

A leave-behind as the name suggests, is a part or sampling of a portfolio that is left with a potential employer or exhibitor after a meeting or interview. Leave-behinds can be anything from brochures, self-promotional flyers, creative packages with key portfolio elements, or printed images. Some leave-behinds are more elaborate and interactive, depending on time and budget allowances, such as an interactive and custom designed and packaged CD or DVD or a nicely printed color brochure with pockets for accompanying CDs and business card.

In Still Life with Milk Can and Apples ... [T]he red, golden, and green apples surround the base of the napkin, which is crumpled and folded in such a way that its upward movement in the center of the composition gives a focus and dynamism to the whole. Its diagonals and curved forms are rendered with both strength and nuance in short hatchings of shades of blue-green, gray, and white to convey a powerful form reminiscent of the profile of the Mont Sainte-Victoire.

William Rubin observes that the “antinaturalistic patterning of the latter [the tablecloth] virtually forms a monumental ‘landscape’ of its own in the center of the picture; less like cloth than a mountain range, it locks the forms of the fruit in place at its feet, much as Mont Sainte-Victoire does in many of Cézanne’s landscapes, in which the mountain unites at its base the nearby houses and trees.”

Stone age people left behind cave paintings,
carvings, and strange patterns of rocks on rocks.

Since then people have left behind statues
and poems and books and songs and feature films.

Soon, soon, for the first time in all of this—
the whole saga of human existence—
soon there will be the first generation
to come and go and leave behind nothing.

Soon—maybe they are the young people now—
a generation will not leave behind
its images, sounds, words or ideas.

There will be only magnetic patterns
that can be read correctly or read wrong
or disappear if the wrong key is pressed
or disappear if someone decides it
or disappear if a magnetic field
of sufficient strength pulses somewhere near
in some kind of astrophysics event
or some kind of high tech warfare event.

There will be only magnetic patterns.

You can’t see them or hear them or touch them
unless you are wired up, plugged in, switched on.

When that generation has come and gone
how will the generations that come next
learn that nothing is what it seems to be?

A crumpled up napkin on a table
isn’t a mountain except when it is.

Thinking of napkins. Thinking of mountains.

Thinking of what they both are when they’re not
what they seem to be. Rocks on rocks persist.